Ponyboy versus Johnny
by Eve Davidson
Summary: A fictional person's identification with Ponyboy and Johnny.


Let's just say I read "The Outsiders" when I was quite a bit younger, and I was hopeful without even realizing it. Everything seemed filled with such promise. When I read "The Outsiders" I liked the characters, especially Ponyboy and Johnny, but I identified with Ponyboy.

Ponyboy is smart, and I thought I was, too. Ponyboy could write, and so could I. He did well in school like I did. He was thoughtful and dreamy and given to literary references just like me. He noticed sunsets and the embers on the ends of cigarettes and the eye colors of all his friends. He noticed things and so did I. He had people who cared for him and looked out for him, and I had this, once. He lived in a dangerous world but I lived in the world, too. He was willing to reach out to other groups, to Cherry the soc, and I was willing to reach out, too. His future was bright, this was a given, and I thought I had a bright future, too.

As time has gone on and the days bleed into each other and I watch whatever promise I had fizzle away, I've come to identify more with Johnny than with Ponyboy. The potential to get beat up and let down and neglected in whatever way is very real, and like Johnny I've felt the emptiness of being let down. There is no more easy confidence in my intelligence or my ability to do anything, and I feel like Johnny sitting on the back steps of the church struggling to read "Gone with the Wind," He was left back in school and I was left back in life, and I've had the people who were supposed to love and care for me turn like rabid dogs and viciously take any trust away. I know where the suspicious look in the eyes comes from.

There was no easy out for Johnny, he was in the fire of redemption after killing the soc, and I burn there, too. Little deaths every day, the death of my confidence, compassion, enthusiasm, their blood spreading on the concrete in the moonlight. I clutch that knife and wonder what went wrong.

When I watch the movie now it is Johnny's haunted stare that resonates with me. Ponyboy said Johnny's teachers thought he was just plain dumb, and the world thinks this about me. Nothing I say comes out right, nothing I try to do succeeds. I'm stuck in my own personal east side hell.

There won't be any getting out of it. Johnny had to die in order to save those children, you have to give your whole self to make anything of anything. You have to let go someday like Johnny did, getting more and more tired, leaving life behind. No matter how many years you get it won't be enough.

It's not all bad. Johnny is wiser than Ponyboy in many ways. He doesn't blame others for things he does and things that happen, like Ponyboy tends to do. I try to do that now, I try to own my actions and the consequences. "This is all my fault," Johnny says at the church, and I know everything in my personal disaster is my fault, as well. And Johnny stood up for what was right, he told Dally to leave the girls alone at the movies and he saved Ponyboy and he listened to his friends. If I could do half of that, maybe I could find something.

Sometimes I feel mired in the way he was in the beginning of the book, scared and suspicious, and those adjectives more often than not describe me. People will hurt you, and Johnny knew that, and so do I. I know it now. And no amount of writing ability or the ability to draw or to notice colors and clouds or to remember poems will help you when you're bleeding and half conscious in the vacant lot. Nothing will stop your mother from screaming at you and your father from hitting you and sleeping in the cold. Nothing will help. My life didn't turn out to be chocolate cake for breakfast and winning on the track team.

"I'm pretty bad off, ain't I, Ponyboy?" Johnny said in the hospital, and I know what he meant. All the twisted piles of problems that keep cropping up, the way I seem to never be getting ahead, the way my life has veered off the magical track I had imagined when I was younger, it's like third degree burns and a broken back. There's no way to recover.

What am I trying to say? So I view my life through the lens of this novel? So these characters are as real as living people to me? I'm not gold, but I was, maybe that's the problem. "Don't be so bugged about being a greaser. You still have a lot of time to make yourself be what you want," Johnny told Ponyboy in the letter, "there's still a lot of good in the world," I feel time is running out, maybe. I'll be stuck, and it's getting harder to see the good in the world. Johnny saw it, but I'm having trouble. Maybe that's why I'm relating more and more to Johnny, because for him time ran out, and I can see it running out for me.


End file.
